I had previously mentioned that Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 would be coming this year – and it’s here! I’m pleased to announce the availability of Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2 which is ready to download.

We’re delighted to continually add value to Exchange as part of our ongoing release rhythm and the enhancements in this Service Park are largely due to your feedback. SP2 includes much anticipated features such as the Hybrid Configuration Wizard, Address Book Policies, Outlook Web App Mini and Cross-Site Silent Redirection for Outlook Web App as well as customer requested fixes and rollups released prior to Service Pack 2.

As we did with SP1, Service Pack 2 is a fully slipstreamed version of Exchange with 13 server languages and 66 client languages (including English) available in a single package. There is no separate download for client and server languages; you’ll only need to download and install separate language packs if you have Unified Messaging.

I had also announced that we would support the on-premises configuration of Exchange in a multi-tenant environment. In order to receive support, we’ll publish a follow-up blog shortly that will outline some scenarios and point to our detailed guidance. Please stay tuned.

Thanks again to our TAP participants and you, our customers for all of the great feedback that you provide us!

Already have it in production to resolve some outstanding issues. Only problem is the Exchange Management Console will not launch correctly in our production environment. Unexpected error while executing command 'Get-LinkedRoleGroupForLogonUser'. Error on all the exchanage servers, and with different accounts. Works fine in my test environment. Production does have an empty root domain however.

@Schema Change???: Yes, there's a schema change, as mentioned in the announcement:

Announcing Exchange 2010 SP2.

In order to support these newly added features, there will be a requirement for customers to update their Active Directory schema. We’ve heard the feedback loud and clear from our customers on multiple occasions regarding delays

that can be caused to deployment as a result of needing to update your schema and as such with the release of Exchange 2010 SP2 are communicating the required changes ahead of release in order to assist our customers with planning their upgrade path ahead

I have tried SP2 on one machine which has Management Tools only. The Exchange Management Console is now unusable: "Initialization failed" "The following error occurred when retrieving user information for... The term 'Get-LinkedRoleGroupForLogonUser' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program."

Now does that mean that an SP2 console doesn't work without SP2 servers to connect to? Or has something broken?

Nice job, looks like some great new features. With regards to address book policies, any plans to implement a parameter such as 'isDefaultAddressBookPolicy'. Very similar to 'IsDefaultGlobalAddressList' or IsDefaultPolicy (ActiveSync). I believe it would bring value to have the ability to create a ABP that all users inherit by default.

Thanks Exchange team for bringing SP2 out. I do however have a question. Does this SP2 includes the Recommended Windows Hotfix for Database Availability Groups running Windows Server 2008 R2 hotfixes that were mentioned just two articles ago? If not do i apply them first before installing SP2 or after installing SP2.

RobK: The recommended hotfix for DAGs in a Windows hotfix, not an Exchange hotfix. Thus, it is not included in Exchange 2010 SP2. The order in which you install these two items (the hotfix and SP2) typically does not matter. However, we would recommend that both be installed.

@Scott - the issue is on a SBS box Exchange 2010 sp1 already was on there and it was the product team that installed the hotfixes. Just confirming that none of these are new ones, if we had them before, either us installing them on standalone servers or the sbs dev team, there are no new ones to be installed.

The UDP notification work we delivered has been working correctly since its release in E2010 SP1 RU3. The underlying issue that many customers have seen with Online Mode clients has been due to view change notification issues; specifically that view change notifications are not returned in the same RPC buffer that included the move/deletion RPC operation response. This issue affected all Outlook versions operating in online mode. In the case of OL2003, this results in extra roundtrips for a client to pull notification information from the server as the original call has completed, so the RPC Client Access service has to fire a UDP notification to get the client’s attention that a change within the folder has occurred.

@ Kris - A default ABP does sort of exist really, in that the GAL shown is the one set as IsDefaultGlobalAddressList (assuming it is left as default filter-wise), and there is a default OAB, and all AL's are shown by default. So the fallback/default is, the default pre-sp2.

I get the suggestion, and we did did consider it, but we decided to make the default ABP effectively the default that you see when you have no ABP's at all.

We did make sure we added the ABP picker to the new-mailbox wizard to make sure that an ABP can be assigned on creation, as we think that's important once ABP's are in use. Obviously the cmdlets support that too.

@Neil Flanagan - Yes, you need SP2 servers to connect to in order to resolve your issue. When EMC is opened it establishes a connection over Remote Powershell. The cmdlet which is being called is new in SP2 and thus if your EMC session attaches to an SP1 server, the server won't understand how to respond appropriately and cause an EMC failure.

Can you tell me if the issue described in the thread below is fixed in SP2? At the bottom of the thread, there's a link to the issue in the Microsoft Partner Forums where we were told the issue was scheduled to be fixed in SP2.

I will be rolling out several SBS 2011 installations in the near future. Is there a way to install SP2 during the initial install of SBS, or must it be applied as a patch to the stock installation of Exchange 2010?

We had an transport agent assembly that worked fine in SP1 but apparently didn't work once SP2 was installed and the Transport Service would start, but stop a few seconds later. We uninstalled the transport agent and the Transport Service started working again, but perhaps the Transport Service should should be coded such that a failing Transport Agent assembly wouldn't crash the Transport service.

@ Daniel: All that you should have to do in that case is remove the policy as per the KB article and then re-run SP setup. That being said - it is not very obvious what is going on and we are evaluating how to deal with this in the future.